Painting Stained Glass Techniques

When painting stained glass, it is advisable to use a bridge, which allows a rest for the working hand and prevents smudging on the surface of the glass. Find out how to paint decorative pieces of glass with helpful instruction from an experienced glass artist in this free video on glass crafts.

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Video Transcript

Hello my name is Leslie Marler. I am a glass painter. I was trained in Hadamar, Germany. The apprenticeship takes about three years and I have been doing that for six years now. I'm going to talk about stained glass painting techniques today. Normally we start with a design so we know where the black lines go and the shades then we cut the glass and we apply the black lines which is going to show us the surroundings. I'm going to mix up the paint and I'm basically I'm, it's like I'm drawing a line but I'm using a brush, like on the butterfly you can see, you can see how it will look after it was fired and so that's the first and one of the most important steps. So it's just for the line. I normally use a bridge for my hands so I won't touch the glass and I'm free to move over it, that's the first step. The second step is to apply a coat, a wash. I normally use the same paint. I can also use the brown after the firing and take off some lights that can help them through brush, different types of brushes. I have flat ones that I use. I use round ones. There is different sizes too, smaller ones for details or larger for bigger areas. For some details I use a quill or a razor knife and I just basically take off lights to create the delusion of a picture or basically creating a picture. Everything I'm doing, none of it is reversible so whenever I mess something up I have to do the whole piece over again so that takes some concentration sometimes. As you can see here I scratched the upper piece and because it wasn't fired I have to do it all over again, that's one of the pieces. I was doing some stippling here, apply more pressure to take more paint away to give more light and a little pressure to create just small lights, little lights. Take the knife. I can put lines in, more like a quill, and that's how I paint on glass.